Sunday, June 06, 2004

In the name of the father

The Daily Telegraph has an exclusive interview with Saddam Hussein’s eldest daughter, currently living in Amman with her 5 children. She seems to be taking her brothers’ deaths and Saddam’s capture really hard:
“As Saddam undergoes daily interrogation by his CIA captors and Iraq is plagued by a bloody insurrection, the mother-of-five has undergone cosmetic surgery, works out several mornings a week at a smart ladies' gym and is often seen in Amman's leading jewellery and clothes stores...
“Jordanians who visited the Amman Surgical Hospital last summer... were told that Raghad had undergone cosmetic surgery on her breasts, and possibly also a tummy tuck last August, shortly after her brothers Uday and Qusay were killed in a shoot-out with US forces in Iraq....”
“Remarkably, one of their first instructions to the leading Jordanian lawyer, Mohamed Roshdan [appointed by the Hussein family to defend Saddam – M.S.], was that he should write to John Ashcroft, the American attorney-general, requesting the return of jewels from the former presidential palaces, and even the wads of dollars found with Saddam at the time of his arrest.
“These were the family's personal wealth, they said, and not state property.”
And before anyone counters that Uday and Saddam were responsible for murdering her husband, according to the article, her house is “a shrine to Saddam. Visitors ushered through the front door by a Filipina maid find themselves staring at a painting of the deposed dictator”– with nary a picture of her husband in sight.

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